This past weekend John and I raced at the hot and humid barber motor sports park in Alabama. Both John and I had never been on this track before which made us have a small disadvantage. However, we learned the track quickly and set lap times in many of the practice sessions in the top 10. John qualified the car 32nd out of the almost 40 cars entered in the race. Sunday morning at 8:30AM the race started. Although the race was early in the morning it was nice to not have to race in the heat of the day. John picked up many positions and handed the car over to me around the 25th position. However, early in the race john reported that 4th gear was going bad and that he sometimes had trouble getting it into gear. Once I got in 4th gear worked for a handful of laps but then it eventually totally went out. This made me have to upshift directly from 3rd to 5th gear. Because of this I was a sitting duck on some of the early race re-starts loosing 1 or 2 positions. On top of not having a 4th gear the car also had an electrical issue. Every other lap or so the car would turn off which meant I lost valuable seconds as I tried to re-start the car. I managed to get the car as high at 8th before having to come in and pit for gas. When the race was over I was just glad the car finished and that we did not have to retire the car early. At the end of the day we finished a disappointing 17th, although with all the bad luck we had it was a alright finish.

-scott

This past weekend we raced at one of North America’s premier race tracks, Watkins glen. We made many changes to the car from the time we rolled the car off the trailer to the time of the race.

John qualified the car in 22nd position. In the race he held off other drivers from behind to hand the car over to me in the same position he qualified it. I came out on track 29th after the driver change and picked up 10 positions in 5 laps. However, contact from behind by another competitor resulted in dropping back to 30th position. At this time we decided to change our pit strategy. A yellow flag came out and instead of pitting early in the yellow and gaining track position we pitted very late in order to save gas and be able to make it to the end of the race with out pitting again. However, the end of the race was plagued with yellow flags which helped many of the other cars that might have needed to pit again for gas. I pitted on lap 37 from 8th position and returned on track in P 29. By one of the first late race yellows I worked my way back up to 14th. On the late race restarts I picked off a couple cars ending up 11th.

The next race is at Barber Motorsports Park in Alabama and the Porsche hopefully will have an advantage over the heavy mustangs….

-scott